Bakufu Ohno Woodblock Print Image Database

Bakufu Ohno (1888-1976) was born in Tokyo. He moved to Kansai after the great Kantou earthquake in 1923. Ohno exhibited oil paintings at Teiten in 1929. He was an honorary member of the Hyogo Prefecture Academy of Fine Arts, and a member of Taiheiyogakai. Ohno produced many landscape and fish prints, including the Familiar Fishes of Nippon (Dai Nihon gyorui gashu) in 1940, which was published by Kyoto Hanga-in; blocks were carved by Matsuda and Kikuda, printed by Shinagawa, Nagae, Uchida and Ohno.

Prints by Ohno never carried title text, and as a result the woodblock print community (including both collectors as well as galleries) has often applied 'unofficial' titles to prints in a haphazard way.

Fortunately access to official titles for some prints does exist via the woodblock print catalogs issued by Kyoto Hanga-In and Shinagawa. At least three such catalogs have been published, but the exact years of publication remain unknown because the catalogs themselves carry no indication of publication date. I estimate that the approximate publication date of my catalog presented here is 1953, because it carries a note on page 12 mentioning a date of January 1954 in the future tense. Thus, many of the prints you see below that are also listed in this catalog have an approximate date of publication of 1950-52. Prints listed below with the title "Unknown Title" have not yet had their titles confirmed from a Kyoto Hanga-In catalog.